A li AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 







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SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 





Some Autumn Days in Iowa 


BY 

Frederick John Lazell 

M 


CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA 
THE IOWAY CLUB 
NINETEEN HUNDRED SIX 


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Copyright, 1906 
by 

Fred J. Lazell 



The Torch Press , Cedar Rapids , Iowa, 
certifies that seventy-five copies of this little 
book have been printed , none of which are 
for sale . 




FOREWORD 


Most of the written inspiration for nature lov¬ 
ers has hitherto come from the east, principally 
New England. Thoreau, Emerson, Bryant, 
Whittier, Burroughs, — these and many others 
have written, with consummate charm and beauty, 
of Nature as seen near the Atlantic seaboard. The 
popular nature books and even many of the scien¬ 
tific works have all been written in the east and 
it has seemed to some as if there was nothing worth 
while on this side of the Appalachians, certainly 
not on this side of the Mississippi. 

But one need not go to Concord to find Walden 
woods and ponds. Had Thoreau lived in Iowa 
he could have written just as richly, and had Bry¬ 
ant’s home been on the hither side of the Father 
of Waters he would have sung just as sweetly. 
By and by some writer with the learning of a 
naturalist and the soul of a poet shall tell of the 
beauties in this great garden of Eden which is 
embraced by two mighty rivers and is filled with 
the color and perfume of the rarest flowers and 
the music of the sweetest of the singing birds. 


6 


FOREWORD 


Well might the Indians call this state “Ioway, 
Ioway, beautiful land.” 

These little papers have no such ambitions. 
They are rather memories of some long happy 
autumn days out of doors in Iowa, with an effort 
to each here and there some glimpses of 

“That thread of the all-sustaining beauty 
Which runs through all and doth all unite.” 

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 

November 30, 1906. 


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AN OCTOBER DAY IN IOWA 

































































































AN OCTOBER DAY IN IOWA 


Ay, thou art welcome, heaven’s delicious breath 1 
When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf, 

And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief. 

And the year smiles as it draws near its death. 

Wind of the sunny south! oh, still delay 
In the gay woods and in the golden air. 

Like to a good old age released from care. 

Journeying, in long serenity, away. 

In such a bright, late quiet would that I 

Might wear out life like thee, ’mid bowers and brooks, 
And, dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks. 

And music of kind voices ever nigh; 

And when my last sand twinkles in the glass 
Pass silently from men as thou dost pass. 

— William Cullen Bryant. 


B ryant’s poems on October are the best to 
be found in the language because he got 
closer to nature than any other poet. The 
call of the wild was ever in his ear. He loved 
nature with a love that knew neither variableness 
nor shadow of turning and he embraced every op¬ 
portunity to “steal an hour from study and care, 
and hie me away to the woodland scene.” You 
may take a book of his poems to the woods and 
verify every line and phrase. That is why his 


10 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


nature poems are the next best thing to nature her¬ 
self. 

But nature is better. No description of nature 
can be equal to nature herself. One day in the 
October fields and woods to him who hath eyes 
to see is worth more than all the sonnets and prose 
poems on October he has ever read. And after 
such a day the sonnets and the prose poems will 
mean more than they have ever done before. The 
sunrise “boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud cup’s 
brim” as it did for Pippa, the mill girl, long ago 
in Asolo. The glorious blue of the cloudless sky, 
the warm sun which “pours out on the fair earth 
his quiet smile — the sweetest of the year,” the 
wondrous blending of colors, the tang of the au¬ 
tumn breeze and the chance to find the last and 
best flower of all the year — the fringed gentian 
— combine to make a day in October a resistless 
attraction “to him who in the love of nature holds 
communion with her visible forms” and tries to 
understand “her various language.” 


South of the four northern tiers of counties 
the fringed gentian is comparatively a rare vis¬ 
itor. But here and there it may be found well 
down beyond the central line and if you have the 
instinct and the patience and the determination 
you shall find it — the flower of which many of 




AN OCTOBER DAY 


ii 


the poets have sung, and none more sweetly than 
Bryant: 


"Thou blossom bright with autumn dew, 
And colored with the heaven’s own blue, 
That openest, when the quiet light 
Succeeds the keen and frosty night, 

‘Thou waitest late and comest alone, 
When woods are bare and birds are flown. 
And frosts and shortening days portend 
The aged year is near its end. 

“Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye 
Look through its fringes to the sky. 

Blue — blue — as if that sky let fall 
A flower from its cerulean wall.*’ 


In Iowa the fringed gentian comes before the 
“woods are bare and birds are flown.” It may 
be different in New England. 

But if you would find the fringed gentian you 
must be a lowly pilgrim. With an automobile 
or even a horse your quest would be as fruitless 
as was the quest of Sir Launfal when with golden 
spurs and richest mail he rode forth to seek the 
holy grail. You must go afoot and walk per¬ 
chance half a day through long slough grass, with 
your clothing covered with Spanish needles, beg¬ 
gar lice, tick trefoil, sand burs and cockleburs un¬ 
til you look almost as forlorn as the leper who 
begged an alms from Sir Launfal, and then, per- 



12 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


haps, just as you come to a little brook like that 
from which Sir Launfal gave the beggar a drink 
you will see a patch of fringed gentians. Then 
you may sit and let their surpassing loveliness sa¬ 
tiate your soul. 

There is no blue in the flower kingdom quite 
so enchanting as the blue of the fringed gentian. 
“Such a dark blue,” writes Thoreau, “surpassing 
that of the male blue bird’s back.” Even Bry¬ 
ant’s line does not fully measure the blueness. The 
deep dark blue of the fringed gentian is bluer than 
any Iowa sky. And Iowa skies are reputed to be 
the bluest in the world unless it be those of Swit¬ 
zerland. 

In the big sloughs which often lie at the foot 
of what the geologists call the “paha ridges” the 
flower hunter may often find the fringed gentian 
(Gentiana crinita), and the closed gentian ( Gen - 
tiana andrewsii ). One specimen of the fringed gen¬ 
tian found recently had upwards of three dozen 
blossoms on a single plant, many of them withered, 
but a large number of them magnificent in their 
beauty, two inches and more long and as big 
round as a man’s third finger. But don’t pull up 
every blossom to be found. One for the vase on 
your library table, and one for an appreciative 
flower-lover will be enough. For the gentian is 
an annual and is too rare to be ruthlessly destroyed. 



AN OCTOBER DAY 


i3 


And Emerson’s lines are always to be remem¬ 
bered: 


“Hast thou named all the birds without a gun ? 
Loved the wood-rose and left it on its stalk ? 

At rich men’s tables eaten bread and pulse ? 
Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust ? 
And loved so well a high behavior, 

In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained. 
Nobility more nobly to repay ? 

Oh, be my friend and teach me to be thine !’* 


The closed gentian is more common and may 
be found by the roadside here and there. Until 
one finds the fringed gentian it seems to be the 
fairest flower of the fall. It also is a wonderful 
blue; a more intense delft-like blue than the soft 
rich blue of the fringed gentian. John Burroughs 
finds it “intensely blue;” Thoreau calls it “a tran- 
scendant blue, a splendid blue, light in the shade 
and turning purple with age. Bluer than the 
bluest sky, they lurk in the moist and shady re¬ 
cesses of the banks,” he writes. This is some¬ 
times true, but not always. There are plenty of 
them to be found in the open meadows, but water 
is essential. They are never found far from wet 
and swamp-like soil and are usually half concealed 
by the long rank grass. Thomas Wentworth Hig- 
ginson calls them “barrel gentians,” which is a 
local name for them in some states. And indeed 




i 4 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


they are shaped exactly like little barrels. But 
such beautiful blossoms ought to suggest something 
better than barrels. They never open. The blue 
corolla is closed at the mouth as if to protect the 
stigmas and stamens from the cold and only they 
see its inward beauty. The flower is like many a 
mother, the beauty of whose life is never seen in 
society, but only by her loved ones at home; or 
like the Sister of Mercy, whom the world knoweth 
not, but whose gentle ways and kindly deeds mean 
so much to the sick or to the children committed to 
her care. The beauty of the life is there and it 
is very real; but it is never paraded. 

There is another beautiful little gentian to be 
found in many parts of Iowa. It is the five-flow¬ 
ered gentian (Gentiana quinque-flora ). It is much 
smaller than the others, and a much paler blue. 
Usually it has five blossoms on a stem, not always. 
The cymose branches curve out and up, making 
the plant look like a delicately beautiful candle¬ 
stick, at the shrine of a saint. This gentian is 
often found growing abundantly on the face of 
a limestone cliff, where the argillaceous shales 
have weathered into a marly slope which is kept 
moist by the water which trickles down from 
above. 

These gentians are almost the only flowers in 
October. Here and there is a straggling aster 



AN OCTOBER DAY 


i5 


and occasionally a blossom of the bonny bouncing 
bet (Saponaria officinalis ), whose bland leaves and 
swollen stems make an oasis of green in a sur¬ 
rounding desert of brown. 


To get the most out of an October day one 
must go to the riverside, even if it be necessary 
to take a short railway journey. On the way 
down late blooming asters nod pleasantly as the 
car passes and red-cheeked boys are in the big 
apple trees shaking down the last of the red-cheek¬ 
ed apples for the red-cheeked girls below. Great 
and countless ears of corn hang ready for the 
husker, one of the biggest and best ripened crops 
for years. Most of the pastures have been baked 
brown by a long dry spell, but here and there a 
meadow of blue grass and clover is as green as 
the garden of Eden. A slight haze hangs over 
the horizon and tints the far woods with purple. 
By the river side, the flowers have mostly gone. 
Here and there a belated lobelia or bell-flower 
gives a glint of blue. The lemon-colored sneeze- 
weed yet lingers here and there and the marigold 
adds a richer tone. But the glory of the flowers 
has gone and passed into the trees. The Virginia 
creeper rises to the top of a tall hickory and the 
sun smiles on the flaming embrace. High on the 
bluffs glow the sun-painted leaves of the sumac. 




16 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


Down the slope is a wondrous commingling of 
colors, which is mirrored in the far and sunny side 
of the river, carmine and crimson, russet and rose, 
brown and bronze, gold and green and gray. 
The glory of the oaks is at its height. In the pure 
warm sunlight of the afternoon the red oak ( Quer - 
cus rubra) and fhe scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea) 
glow like living crimson, the effect heightened by 
the green leaves of the white oak (Quercus alba) 
standing side by side with them and slower to yield 
to the dying year. Even the brilliance of the su¬ 
mac is forgotten in this more majestic splendor 
of the oaks. Nearby the crimson is vivid, intense, 
thrilling. Across the valley and far up the bluffs 
it softens until it meets the sky-line in an indescrib¬ 
able beauty of rose-red and purple. 

We see the beauty of the crimson oaks as 
Arthur’s knights saw the vision of the Holy Grail: 


“Blessed are Bors, Lancelot and Percivale, 
For these have seen according to their sight.” 


The sounds of the year are dying, like the 
flowers and the leaves. The whirr and wheeze 
of the myriads of katydids and crickets which 
buzzed so incessantly in late August and early Sep¬ 
tember is reduced to a monotone. The noise was 




AN OCTOBER DAY 


17 


their love call and the mating season has passed. 
A mud turtle lazily splashes from a rock into the 
water and a seedpod overhead bursts and drops 
a seed at your feet. You hear a rustling over the 
dry leaves and look up to see a gray-tailed squir¬ 
rel hastening, nut in mouth, toward his winter’s 
hoard, setting man the example for life’s winter. 
The jewel weed has burst its last pod and stands 
bare with its seeds scattered in a big circle. 

Most of the birds have gone, but not all. The 
tap, tap, tap of the wood-pecker is heard, and the 
harsh call of the blue-jay. A flock of crows are 
holding an afternoon praise-meeting a hundred 
rods away. A score of migrating robins, fat and 
chirping, flutter down from near-by trees and drink 
at the brink of the river. Farther on the splen¬ 
dor falls, not on castle walls or snowy summits, old 
in story, but on tree-crowned heights unmarred by 
hand of man since Indians sat among them and 
told the legends of their tribes. The long light 
shakes across the faintly tremulous river. You 
give a great shout and listen to hear the purple 
glens replying and the echoes dying, dying — as 
the day and year are dying, slowly, sweetly, grand¬ 
ly, like a good man whose life has borne the fruits 
of honesty, kind words and helpful deeds, and who 
is going serene and unafraid to his long winter 



18 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


sleep beneath the snows until the spring sunshine 
of the ressurrection day breaks in all its beauty. 


Far across the western prairie, the sun sinks 
in a shimmering sea of amber and gold. Slowly 
the glory fades to gray. “The darkening air 
thrills with a sense of the triumphing night.” By- 
and-by Venus glows in the western sky like a beau¬ 
tiful evening lamp. One by one the constellations 
come — “the sweet influence of the Pleiades,” 
Andromeda and Pegasus, the Hyades with Alde- 
baran, Canis Major with Sirius, whose fervid reign 
is over. The darkness deepens; it is night: 

“Night with her train of stars, 

And her great gift of sleep.” 




SOME NOVEMBER DAYS IN IOWA 










SOME NOVEMBER DAYS IN IOWA 


“No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, 

No comfortable feel in any member, 

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, 

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, 

November.” 

Poor Thomas Hood! He lived in England. 
For him the yellow fog, the gray skies, the bleak 
winds, the cheerless rains. If he could have spent 
one November in Iowa he would never have 
pictured Autumn sitting melancholy and tearful, 
alone upon a mossy stone, reckoning up the dead 
and gone: 

“The year’s in the wane, 

There is nothing adorning, 

The night hath no eve. 

And the day has no morning. 

Cold winter gives warning.” 

Most of the British poets sang in a similar 
strain. Shelley writes a dirge for the “dead cold 
year,” and asks the months 

“From November to May 
In your saddest array 
To follow the bier 
Of the dead cold year 

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulcher.” 


22 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


The New England poets have been wont to 
follow these conceptions of the later Autumn. 
Whittier sees all things around him stark and 
dumb, praying for the snows to come. Bryant 
mourns because “The south wind searches for the 
flowers, whose fragrance late he bore, and sighs to 
find them in the wood and by the stream no more.” 
But the Iowa poet ought to sing in a happier strain. 
October in Iowa runs well into the month of 
November; for the first half of the month there 
is little difference. The many warm, sweet sunny 
days take all of the sadness out of the dying year. 
The sun smiles gently and benignly through the 
smoky air and gives a halo of amber and purple to 
the soft sepias and gleaming grays of the wood¬ 
lands which a month ago were brilliant with 
crimson and gold. 


“No flowers, no leaves, no birds,” forsooth! 
If only Hood could have taken a walk through an 
Iowa wood, some bright sunny morning in early 
November. The willows stand guard at the very 
entrance to the wood. All through October when 
the wondrous coloration of the oaks and maples, 
alders and aspens, was running up and down the 
gamut of brilliancy, the willows retained their soft 
and restful green. Now the green is slowly 
searing to brown and the leaves are fluttering down 




NOVEMBER DAYS 


23 


in the sunshine while a flock of snowbirds (Juncos) 
with their bright yellow bills and their slate grey 
heads and throats make merry among them. Down 
the trunk of the tree runs the white-breasted nut¬ 
hatch and his incessant tap-tap-tap gives emphasis 
to the stillness of the mild November morning. 

The savants say that there is no state in all the 
world more favored with bird-life than Iowa. The 
state lies in the embrace of two mighty rivers with 
many fine long tributaries and along and between 
these rivers the great flood of bird-life goes north¬ 
ward in the springtime and southward in the fall, 
filling the air with matchless music and charming 
the eye with incomparable color. In his “Kim” 
Kipling speaks of the Great Trunk Road as the 
highway for all sorts and conditions of Hindoo 
life; so Iowa is a highway for the vernal and the 
autumnal flood of bird-life. The robin and the 
hepatica, the blue bird and the spring beauty follow 
the springtime up the valleys; the hepatica and the 
spring beauty show their beauty no more until the 
next spring, but the robin and the blue bird pass 
through again late in the fall. 

A few robins are usually seen as late as the 
first week in November. Then there are some 
hardy little creatures which stay with us all winter 
though one must go to the woods to see them. 
Among them are the chickadee, the nuthatch, the 
waxwing, the American gold-finch, the blue jay, 



24 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


the crow, the snowbird, and some of the sparrows 
and woodpeckers; the Iowa woods and fields are 
never wholly deserted. The scream of the blue 
jay, the caw of the crow and the chick-a-dee-dee-dee 
of the little black capped bird which bears the name 
are all familiar sounds in November. 


No flowers, no leaves, said Hood. Once, 
again, poor Hood! In this walk through the 
Iowa woodlands in early November, there are 
several varieties of late asters, some straggling 
blossom in the sheltered places, of the Indian 
tobacco {Lobelia inf lata) , pepper grass ( Lepidium 
Virginicum) , and sneezeweed {Helenium autum- 
nale) . If one should set out to swell the list and 
should call a few fading petals a blossom he might 
doubtless swell the list to five times this number. 
The dandelion {Taraxacum officinale) may often 
be found in November, the yellow blossom forming 
the golden period at the end of the flowering 
season. 

How many have seen a dandelion ? Everyone, 
of course. Yes, but how many have really seen 
one? When is its stalk the longer? When is it 
drooping, and when does it stand erect? It was 
Darwin who first noticed that the stalk is short and 
drooping while the flower is full of yellow gold, 
but long and erect when the flowers have developed 




NOVEMBER DAYS 


25 


into the white and fluffy seeds. Of course, every¬ 
one knew it after Darwin had recorded his obser¬ 
vations. But no one had really seen it before. 

As to the leaves — well, the common bramble 
shows the bronze green of its leaves to better 
advantage now than at any time during the sum¬ 
mer. The same is true of the cat-brier or carrion- 
flower (Smilax herbacea), the plant which has so 
offensive an odor in the flowering season, but makes 
up for it by its graceful green vines and leaves the 
rest of the season until well along into November. 
The oaks have shed many of their leaves by the 
end of the first week in November, though some 
linger much longer. The white willow fails about 
the same time. 

Through the woodlands which slope gently 
upward toward the crest of the ridge there is a 
thick carpet of the fallen leaves and among these 
another nature lover, with an eye for his table, is 
poking with a stick. He has been out for an hour 
and he carries a peach basket which he has almost 
filled with mushrooms (Armillaria mellea ). “You 
can hardly make a mistake at this time of the year,” 
he says as he goes down on one knee and cuts off a 
fine bunch with the table-knife which he carries. 
“See this growth like a cobweb from the stem to 
the gills? When you see that you may put the 
mushroom in your basket and take it home for your 
dinner. Be sure to gather those that are fresh and 



26 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


firm. Those that have grown old and flabby are 
not good.” 


Over the crest of the ridge and down the slope 
to the river the grays and the sepias are brightened 
by the high notes of the late orange-colored pods 
and the scarlet seeds of the waxwork or bittersweet 
(Celastrus scan dens) , also, here and there, the 
burning bush, or wahoo ( Euonymus atropurpur- 
eus) with its numerous and beautiful long drooping 
peduncles and deeply four-lobed crimson pods 
through which the scarlet seeds are bursting. This 
is one of the most ornamental of the native shrubs. 
The wonder is that more of them are not seen in 
gardens. And by-the-way, many of the wild 
shrubs, to say nothing of the wild herbs might well 
find a place around the dwelling of the nature 
lover. They are far more beautiful and appro¬ 
priate than some of the artificial ornamental oddi¬ 
ties. The hardy clematis, the common virgin’s 
bower ( Clematis Virginiana) , the Virginia creeper 
(Ampelopsis quinquefolia) , the steeple bush 
(Spireae tomentosa) , the common meadow-sweet 
(Spireae salitcifolia) , the goat’s beard ( Spireae 
aruncus ), the black haw ( Viburnum prunifolium ), 
the honey-suckle ( Lonicera grata), the cat-brier 
(Smilas herbacea) — at least one town lot has 
many of these and many have wondered from what 
far-away state these beautiful shrubs were imported. 




NOVEMBER DAYS 


27 


Close by the river-side there lies a mighty fallen 
oak. The forces of age, erosion and the winds 
have laid the monarch low and Spenser’s beautiful 
lines come to the mind: 

“There grew an aged tree on the green 
A goodly oak sometime it had been; 

With arms full and strong and largely displayed, 

But of their leaves they were disarrayed: 

The body big and mightily plight. 

Thoroughly rooted and of wondrous height; 

Whilom had been king of the field, 

And mochel mast to the husband did yield, 

And with his nuts larded many a swine; 

But now the gray moss marred his rine. 

His bared boughs were beaten with storms; 

His top was bald and wasted with worms 
His honor decayed, his branches sere.” 

There is something pathetic in the fall of so 
mighty a monarch of the forest. It is like the fall 
of a strong, forceful, helpful leader of men, long 
eminent in the community, sought by those who 
needed help or inspiration, powerful and masterful 
in the councils of the state or the nation. The 
weaknesses of old age, the storms of abuse and the 
undermining influences of those eager to force him 
out and occupy his place, finally lay him low before 
his appointed time — everyone can think of such 
a character. 


The old tree has brought up large quantities of 
dirt and among its gnarled roots there are also 




28 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


many fragments of limestone rock, for this is a 
limestone slope and the gray masses of castellated 
rocks beautified by the bright green mosses jut out 
here and there between the trees every few rods. 
Prying out one of the pieces of rock one is surprised 
to see it practically a solid conglomerate mass of 
marine shells, of various sizes and shapes. Other 
pieces are tried with the same result. Here are the 
quaint little shells of the Devonian series, remind¬ 
ers of the time, many millions of years ago, when 
Iowa with many of the adjoining states was a vast 
warm sea. A little more investigation shows the 
evidences of the coral formation which rises at 
Rock Island, at Iowa City and here and there up 
northward into Buchanan county. Little coiled 
shells, like worms, cornet shaped tubelets, these 
and many others are all found either in this mass 
of rock or near-by. 

But the best of the discovery is a litle further 
along the river bank on a rocky open place which 
goes to the water’s edge. This was the only place 
anywhere in the vicinity last summer where grew 
the partridge pea (Cassia ch am a e crist a ). The 
plant was so beautiful in July that no one would 
have thought of looking to see what lay beneath 
it. It was one of the most interesting plants of 
the summer, with each of its leaves made up of ten 
to fifteen pairs of linear oblong leaflets, a cup¬ 
shaped gland beneath the lowest pair and the large 




NOVEMBER DAYS 


29 


showy yellow flowers on their slender pedicles 
making the bank a mass of bright color. The 
leaflets close at night and during stormy weather 
and they are also somewhat sensitive to the touch. 
There are five large yellow petals, four of them 
spread out flat, but the fifth, a lateral petal, is 
shaped like a shallow spoon about the stamens 
while the pistil extends downward across the broad 
petal beneath. This plant has the “nectar guides” 
common in the leguminosae family. At the base 
of the two upper petals and the other lateral one 
there are spots of crimson purple which are like 
sign boards for the insects, telling them where the 
nectar lies. The broad lower petal is the natural 
stepping stone for the insect and when he alights 
he brushes pollen from another flower upon the 
stigma. Then he goes towards the crimson spots 
and begins to gather the nectar and as he does so 
he brushes against the stamens and receives the 
pollen to be deposited upon the stigma of the next 
flower. The curved petal is said to be designed 
to prevent insects from entering the flower the 
wrong way. The right entrance is via the broad 
petal doorstep, brushing against the stigma first 
and the stamens afterward. 


But the bright yellow flowers are all gone in 
November and there is time to look at the rocks 
beneath. The very first one picked up proves to 




30 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


be a bit of coral which the marble men call birds- 
eye, but which scientists call Acervularia David- 
sonii. The long name means that the piece of 
coral is shaped like a cake and was discovered by 
Davidson and so the piece of coral might be called 
Davidson’s coral-cake. It is a most beautiful 
structure. The upper surface shows a fine pattern 
of six-sided cells, about a .quarter inch in diameter. 
A delicately crenulated wall runs around each cell. 
In the middle of the cell there is an apparent small 
cylindrical wall. From this radial lines run to the 
outer wall — these are called septa. Now if you 
bring a piece of this coral home and take it to a 
marble cutter he will split the cake vertically for 
you and polish up one side. That process will 
divide the space between each two septa into deli¬ 
cate horizontal dissepiments and the polished side 
of the coral will look like a piece of beautifully 
woven cloth. Then when you go to the Field 
Museum in Chicago you may visit the geology cases 
and find a specimen just like yours. You may find 
the ledge here mentioned at Midriver Park. Far¬ 
ther back on the bank you may pry some fine speci¬ 
mens out of the clay, which is said to be their 
natural home. If you have a bright member of 
the high school geology class with you he will name 
many other interesting specimens which you find 
in the same place: Favosites Emmonsi, Helio- 
phyllum halli, and several others. 



NOVEMBER DAYS 


3 i 


Every nature lover ought to be able to tell a 
good November squirrel story and the following 
has no merit except that of being strictly true. The 
red squirrel was making a big rustling among the 
dry leaves in search of nuts and he was startled 
when he suddenly caught sight of a stranger. Fol¬ 
lowing his natural inclination he bounded into a 
tree, but it happened to have a long horizontal 
limb and along this he ran directly towards the 
“enemy.” For a moment the representative of the 
genus Sciurus and the representative of the genus 
Homo stood still and looked at each other face to 
face. Then, much to the surprise of the latter, 
the former came forward along the limb until he 
sat in the fork of the branch not more than ten 
feet away, sitting straight up, his eyes shining. 
The kodak was cautiously lifted, the lever pushed 
over, the squirrel paused for perhaps half a minute. 
Then at the first tones of the human voice he 
bounded back among the dry leaves and thence up 
another tree. 

Poor little squirrel. Some heartless pot-hunter 
has doubtless bagged him ere this. 


November in Iowa, brings the first snow. And 
no matter how dreary the snows may become before 
the winter has ended, the first snow is always beau¬ 
tiful. Its approach may be known by the antics of 





32 SOME AUTUMN DAYS IN IOWA 


the sparrows. They congregate in flocks, nerv¬ 
ously darting hither and thither, chirping all the 
while as if they were oppressed with a sense of 
coming disaster. But the next day when the snow 
is falling heavily, these same birds will sit in the 
tree tops and make the merriest kind of music. 
The late Dr. Beardshear in one of his papers, 
speaks of wrapping himself in his great coat and 
lying down in a grove, allowing the feathery flakes 
to cover him while overhead the sparrows caroled 
merrily. It was Dr. Beardshear also who wrote: 
“I have put old Mother Nature to the severest test 
even in the coldest January night in Iowa by a 
leisurely stroll through the woods and down an 
old streamway for miles, with food of thought, 
suggestions of providence and blessings, yea, a 
warmful sympathy which made the fierce winter 
night a retreat of the most sacred thought and 
uplift.” 

Not many of us can reach heights like this. 
But everyone can break the miserable bondage of 
stuffy, superheated rooms and go for a long tramp 
through field and through woodland, enjoying the 
pure air and the glorious sunlight, sweetening his 
mind and enriching his soul. He can appreciate 
the sublime beauty of the lines of the Psalmist: 

“He giveth snow like wool; He scattereth the 
hoarfrost like ashes. 



NOVEMBER DAYS 


33 


“He casteth forth His ice like morsels; who 
can stand before His cold. 

“He sendeth out His word and melteth them. 
He bloweth with His wind, and the waters flow.” 

They had snow and cold in the promised land 
of Palestine. And David enjoyed it; he was a 
nature-lover. 



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»COPY DEL. TOCAT. D1VJ 

DEC 22 1906 
































































































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